In general, transmissive liquid crystal display devices usually include a liquid crystal panel, a backlight unit, a circuit substrate and a power supply for supplying various types of electrical signals to the liquid crystal panel, a case for housing these, and the like.
The liquid crystal panel has a display region (active area) within which a plurality of pixels are arranged and a frame region (non-active area) outside the display region. The display region has pixel electrodes, TFTs, and the like, and displays an image or video. A sealing member for sealing liquid crystal material between substrates, wiring connected to scan lines or signal lines, a monolithically-formed driver circuit, terminals connected to an external driver circuit, and the like are arranged on the frame region, and the frame region is not used for displaying an image or video.
The frame region of the liquid crystal panel does not contribute to display, and it is therefore preferable that the frame region be made narrow. Yet, while the frame region of liquid crystal panels has been progressively narrowed over the years, completely eliminating the frame region is difficult in principle.
Conventional research has focused on narrowing or obscuring the frame region of the display panel. The subject applicants have disclosed in Patent Document 1 a display device in which a transmissive cover is disposed on the viewer side of the display panel. The edge of the transmissive cover in this display device has a convex curved portion that function as a lens.
The convex curved portion (lens portion) of the transmissive cover is typically disposed so as to cover the frame region of the display panel and a part of the display region near the frame region (hereinafter, also referred to as the “peripheral display region”). Light emitted from the pixels (peripheral pixels) in the peripheral display region refracts at the lens portion. This results in the image formed by the peripheral pixels being magnified and displayed on the front side of the frame region. Because of this effect, the frame region becomes obscured or appears as if the frame region does not exist.
The display device described above makes possible for almost the entire panel surface on the viewer side of a portable electronic device such as a smartphone to be used as a display region, for example. This type of electronic device has a large area capable of content display relative to its size and is thus advantageous in terms of making the device more compact.